Butler's Cinema Scene

Lupita Nyong’o

“US” My rating: B+

117 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Humor and horror are strange bedfellows. Usually one negates the other.

But in “Us,” writer/director Jordan Peele’s followup to the spectacular “Get Out,” finds just the right balance between the goofy and the ghastly. The result is a horror movie quite unlike anything we’ve seen, one that mixes a family survival tale with supernatural elements and wraps it all up in a mind-boggling apocalypse.

All while leaving you chuckling.

The story begins in the mid-80’s when little Adelaide (Madison Curry) wanders away from her parents at a beachside amusement park in Santa Cruz. She finds her way to a creepy mirrored funhouse where she encounters her own doppleganger…a little girl who looks exactly like her.

Jump to the present, where the adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is vacationing with her family — husband Gabe (Winston Duke), teen Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and little Jason (Evan Alex) — at her late grandmother’s semi-remote house in the forest outside Santa Cruz.

After the creepiness of the prologue Peele plunges into a family comedy.  Dad is a big friendly doofus, the sort of guy who is always humiliating his adolescent daughter, who rarely looks up from her smart phone. Little Jason is a weird kid who goes through life wearing what looks like a snarling gorilla mask.

As for mother Adelaide…well, she does the usual mom stuff. But being so close to the scene of her childhood trauma — after which she didn’t speak for months — has her cringing.  A trip to the beach finds her suppressing hysteria despite the presence of old friends Kitty and Josh (Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker) and their twin teen daughters.

The other family

Things go seriously wrong about 30 minutes in.  One night the power goes out and the family discovers four figures standing at the end of their driveway.  These individuals — all dressed in red jumpsuits, sandals and carrying big scissors — appear to be a family.

Soon the house is under siege; before long the invaders have made captives of Adeliade and her family. Little
Jason is the first to state the obvious: “They’re us!”

Oh, yeah. These inarticulate, growling nightmares appear to be grotesque duplicates of Adelaide’s clan. (Indeed, one of the film’s great pleasures is watching the double-cast actors portray good and evil characters simultaneously.)

That’s about all that can be safely said about the plot without major spoilers. Let’s just say that wherever you think “Us” is going, you’re wrong.

But no matter how bizarre things get, Peele somehow makes it plausible in the sort of synapse-twisting way that nightmares seem as real as our waking lives.

A lot of that has to do with the acting, particularly from Nyong’o, who as Adelaide expertly plumbs the character’s trip from terror to avenging Mom-angel. And her portrayal of the killer doppleganger Mom, who speaks as though her throat was coated with sandpaper, is about the creepiest damn thing we’ll see on screens this year.

With “Get Out” Peele gave us a psychological horror thriller with a roiling subtext about race.  But though his lead players here are black, race is irrelevant to the world of “Us.” The emphasis here is on pacing, mood and subtle dread, relieved periodically by outbursts of humor.

No doubt in the months and years to come “Us” will be dissected and analyzed for all its hidden meanings.  But I’m not sure there are any meanings here other than the pure visceral rush the movie provides. Like most horror movies, “Us” may not stand up to rigorous logic.

But it needn’t.  While you’re watching it you are completely in the film’s thrall. This is escapism of an exceedingly high order.

| Robert W. Butler